The tribal instincts now obscuring all hope of a rational view of our game

While Anton Ferdinand agonised over whether he could bring himself to shake the hand of John Terry tomorrow, his club Queens Park Rangers and Chelsea issued a joint statement aimed at dampening down the mood on the terraces.

Unfortunately, it contained a phrase so at odds with reality you had to ­wonder in which century it had been composed.

Any time up to the three-quarter point of the last one, maybe, but as a statement of fact in the 21st it was so wide of the mark, so infused with Pollyanna make-believe, it might have come from the ministry of information anticipated by George Orwell.

The underlying sentiment is impeccable, no doubt, and it is certainly to the credit of both clubs that they are among the first to publicly address a problem that has taken a terrible hold on the heart and the spirit of the national game.

However, when Chelsea and QPR say, "We would remind fans that while we want to hear their passion, hatred and abuse is not what being a fan of QPR and Chelsea is about," they are being, at the very least, disingenuous.

The truth is while Chelsea and QPR, like Liverpool and Manchester United, have been obliged to attempt to stifle the acrid fires provoked by charges of racism on the field, they are hardly dealing with a couple of isolated problems. Abuse and hatred, let's face up to it, are not malign but casual visitors to the stadiums of England.

They have become part of the fabric of the game. They are like the responses of Pavlov's foaming dogs. The hatred is programmed now.

At Watford tonight there will, everyone knows, be a set-piece perfectly designed for non-stop abuse. It is the appearance of Tottenham manager Harry Redknapp when he resumes his football duties after a week in court. Redknapp no doubt will brace himself and get on with his job. He knows the world in which he operates.

You might ask what is so bad about today's culture when the cities of England and Europe are no longer exposed to the worst of mass hooliganism, when places like Rotterdam or Brussels need no longer routinely expect the invasion of English lemmings. The problem is different.

It is no longer about violence for its own sake and the attachment of 'supporters' who could hardly have cared less about events on the field. It is the employment of football as an outlet for a thousand resentments, a means to express tribal loyalty - and identity - which can distort any argument, re-arrange any event out on the field.

This week we had the Mario Balotelli affair, a classic example of how today's football fan sees everything through the prism of his own prejudice. He does not take a position shaped by the evidence of his own eyes. He first reminds himself of who he is and which side of the issue he has to represent.

So City fans rushed to tell the talk shows that Mario Balotelli was once again the victim of a biased media who saw not an innocent mishap but a shocking case of violent irresponsibility. It was, they said, a despicable contrivance. Then you looked at the replay again and you saw Balotelli's boot going in, with incontrovertible intent. It did not help that City felt unable to concede that their player had indeed crossed a line beyond which all is unacceptable.

You have to be in the grounds to feel the weight of the tribalism - the sense that objectivity has been tucked into an inside pocket with the click of the turnstile.

One example less dramatic but still hard to forget came at Stamford Bridge recently when Balotelli's team-mate, the sublime David Silva, was brought down by the hanging leg of a Chelsea defender. It was, to any neutral eye, a stonewall penalty but Silva didn't get the award. Instead, he suffered mass abuse every time he touched the ball, however creatively, however imbued with that quality which in a different value system, would make the game supremely worth seeing.

His reward was to be branded a cheat, just as Balotelli was this week seen by many as a victim. The rationale, for want of a better word, is that you pay your money and you take your choice. Inevitably, it just gets that much harder to see where the value is.

Still a scandal that we can't turn to TV

Of all the recent refereeing controversies - and the exasperating failure of football to turn to technology - perhaps the most outrageous came at Anfield when Phil Dowd so absurdly penalised Manchester City's Micah Richards for handball.

It was bad enough that Dowd got his decision so profoundly wrong. Compounding the disaster was that he repeatedly raised his arms to the sky by way of justification. His suggestion was that Richards had raised his arms in order to stop a shot. The facts were quite different - and could have been almost instantly transmitted by a fourth official empowered by television.

The most sickening aspect of the situation is the refusal to recognise this reality - or tot up the scale of the damage to the good name of football that is accumulating so fast.

The game is ever faster and so often cynically perverted by sharp professional practice, which means that hardly a big match passes now without some crucial mistake by a referee. Still, the remedy, taken up by so many major sports, continues to be ignored.

It is now a full-blown scandal.

A smile returns to face of Pakistan cricket

It was supposed to be the day when England's cricket team re-asserted themselves as the world's No1 Test team - and for much of the second day that was precisely what it was.

This no doubt had much to do with the ability of the brilliant coach Andy Flower to remind his players of what they had achieved and precisely how they did it. There followed superb examples of the kind of application which made Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott such key factors in the renaissance of English cricket.

Yet going into this morning's action we had still more evidence of a revival which is surely one of the most astonishing in the recent history of world sport.

Pakistan continue to display a fighting character, an almost cheerful stoicism, that it was reasonable to believe had been beaten out of them for at least a generation.

With Pakistan's brilliant talisman, Saeed Ajmal once more on the rampage, England can no longer have any doubts that they have a most serious fight on their hands.

It is good for their competitive health - and the best possible news for all of cricket.